Terminator 2: A Good Movie That Hates Itself

Why do the screenwriters appear to want to avoid creating fear of the mechanical monster?

Terminator 2 is one of the most famous sci-fi movies of all time. Its influence on the culture cannot be understated. The iconic character, Sarah Connor, is shown in her prime, and fans generally regard the movie as the best in the franchise, as they should.

The writing is solid, and the story is concise. That’s not to say the film is perfect. It reeks of the Nineties. The soundtrack is terrible, which gives the movie a very campy feeling at times, and the graphics have not aged well at all. Be that as it may, I’ll repeat that the writing is good, good enough to overshadow the movie’s dated flaws.

The actors do a wonderful job. Edward Furlong, who plays John Connor, steals the show. He is my favorite character in this entire franchise. Arnold Schwarzenegger is Arnold Schwarzenegger. He plays a robot, and he plays it well. However, since he was in the prime of his career during this film, his acting skills have improved considerably, and he manages to show little nuances in his facial expressions that make the Terminator seem more human.

I do have mixed emotions about this. On the one hand, a robot shouldn’t be able to feel anything, but to the movies’ credit, this inconsistency is played for laughs and is used to endear John and the audience to the Terminator. I could’ve done without it, but I suspect most viewers would disagree. And I have to grudgingly admit that Schwarzenegger’s additions to his robotic character do help the movie.

Social commentary

I have to add, however, that, sadly, the movie really needs these moments of levity. There’s an unfortunate amount of social commentary. Linda Hamilton, despite putting on a fine performance playing Sarah Connor, does come across as bitter in ways that make very little sense for her character. Specifically, she seems to have a deep-seated hatred towards men, which doesn’t work, given that the most influential figures in her life are men like Kyle and John. It’s hard to know whether this was a decision on the part of the director or on the part of the actress. I suspect it’s a little bit of both, but it’s impossible to know for sure. Either way, this contempt towards the male sex and the shoehorned social commentary reacting to the political topics of the time really weakens the film.

The last thing I’ll mention on this topic before going into detail on specific scenes is that the ending drags, which should never be an issue for an action flick. There are multiple fake-outs, where either the hero or the villain are supposedly killed, and this goes on for far too long, even to the point that the ending starts to become hard to follow, and to make matters worse, the movie spends so much time on the climax that it leaves zero time for the falling action. I would argue that this final issue is one of the things that ultimately killed the franchise. More on that later.

After the apocalypse?

The movie begins with a pleasant scene of people living their lives, which then transitions to a post-apocalyptic landscape. An army of Terminators marches along the decimated terrain as Sarah Connor explains that, once again, Skynet has sent a Terminator into the past; only this time, the robot has been ordered to kill John Connor, her son. And just like before, a protector has been sent to find the Terminator’s prey, and it’s anyone’s guess who will reach John first.

After this brief exposition, the Terminator appears and stumbles into a bar to find some clothes. During this scene, the women leer at the unclad android in a way that was a little over the top. The writers might’ve been trying to play this off as a joke, but I found it cartoonish. In reality, there would’ve been a variety of reactions from everyone at the bar. To have all the men glaring and all the women leering felt a little lazy.

The reason that the opening scene from the first film worked so well was because the Terminator ran into a small group of thugs. This accomplished a couple of things. Number one: Since these thugs were friends, it made sense for them to have the same reaction, and it made sense for them to all mock the robot because a viewer can reasonably infer that a group of thugs wouldn’t try to help a real human who was exposed to the elements. Number two: the fact that these individuals were thugs implied that they were tough men, so to have the robot defeat them easily established the Terminator as a threat. But the simplistic reaction of the entire bar wasn’t justified, which means the movie wasn’t going for realism—it wasn’t trying to keep you in a suspension of disbelief. It was trying to do something else. In the end, this scene seemed to have an ulterior motive. It set the tone for the whole film, and not only that. This scene, while seemingly insignificant, forever changed the genre of the Terminator movies.

Let me ask a question. Should this sequel have been funny? Should Arnold have been making angry, sarcastic glances at the camera?

It’s a funny thing, really. My inner child loves this movie with a wild passion. And my inner critic loves the writing, the characters, and the overall structure of the plot. This film does way more right than it does wrong. But as much as I love Terminator 2, there was a small worm in my gut making me feel like something was off when I watched it in preparation for this review, and as I’ve thought back to the first movie, I’ve realized that the problem is that The Terminator was a horror story. However, this movie is trying to be a parody of its predecessor while also appealing to kids. That’s why John Connor is an inventive young teenager during the story. This is not to say that the movie is bad, but there is a sort of rejection of the first film that I don’t quite understand. This movie is mocking itself. That’s the reason for the bar room scene.

There’s no need for an over-the-top fight with the bikers to establish the Terminator as a threat, and there’s no reason to have the women leering at the Terminator, especially since this instantly makes the robot less menacing. But that’s the point! The robot should be terrifying; however, they humiliated the Terminator right from the start. They could’ve just shown the Terminator standing after the lightning storm and walking off. That would’ve been enough. Then, when he showed up again while John was running down a hallway, the audience would’ve been terrified, and it would’ve made the movie’s twist that much better. Instead, the writers go out of their way to make sure the audience isn’t afraid of the first movie’s mechanical monster. Why? We’ll explore this question further in the next review.